beading...first try

i bought a couple things to try beading this weekend.

i thought it went well, although, holy carp, my eyes were crossed by the time i just did this little bit. poor old eyes! i need brighter light and (sigh) magnification. i need to keep my eye out for a silkier thread. royale brand cotton is a bit less than jewelry-worthy, imho.

ETA: aha! this looks promising.

youtube link to adding beads to crochet to make a rope.

also, i finally came up with a halfway decent idea for my HPKCHC. now, to get MOVING!

Christmas part 3 and my mystery project!

I figured, before i gushed about my New Year endeavor, I should probably show you all what happened with all the Christmas knitting. I ended up making a snake-and-mouse combo for my nephew (at his request) The snake is designed to swallow the mouse, which it did do successfully several times. However, the mouse, my nephew discovered, was really a Kung Fu mouse, and he had a ball whipping around by its tail (thank goodness the thing was so securely knit on it could never come apart!). I also had a little extra time and made him a bat as well, from a pattern I'd used successfully earlier this summer. It was an even faster knit since I'd made one before, and i finished the entire thing on Christmas Eve. of all the things i did, i think that impressed my dad the most!

Here's the menagerie:



A while ago, I stumbled across a lace-shawl designer named MMario and fell in love with many of his shawl designs. They are fantastic, but look so complicated that i have never dared to try one. He has a real penchant for theming his shawls on various fantasy series and has a number of shawls based on HP as well as Anne McCaffrey's Dragonriders of Pern series and Terry Pratchett's Discworld series, just to name a few.

Well..............when MMario announced last fall that he was going to be hosting a "mystery shawl knit-along" starting Jan 1, I just couldn't resist. What better time to learn how to do lace than with a knit-along, where I could get help from the other participants and where everybody would be more-or-less at the same pace, as the clues would be spaced out weekly???

MMario gave us preferred yarn colors and thickness, and told us that beads would be optional. I rather ignored the thing about beads - i figured, why complicate things?

Ha.

I ordered my yarn just as soon as i got my first paycheck from my new job; i'd spent weeks scoping out yarns all over the internet to find just what i wanted, and it was too expensive to get otherwise. Unfortunately, that meant that it didn't arrive in time for new years, when the first clue was released. I contented myself with "practicing" the first clue with yarn i already had, just to get the feel for how it worked. and i watched.

I watched all the other participants talking aobut their beads and how to do that, and what kinds of beads. I watched their examples start to be posted as they finished the first clue. and man. it looked SOOO COOL with beads. so.......while i was waiting for the yarn, i started looking at beads too. dumb, really, because without the yarn in hand, picking the right color of beads was like reaching blindfolded into a bag. I ended up ordering some inexpensive beads in 3 different colors. none of them, it turned out, worked with the yarn i got. instead, i found some even more inexpensive beads at JoAnn fabrics yesterday.

duh! moral of the story: CURB YOUR IMPULSES!

anyway, I finished knitting Clue one today. Clue 2 came out on Thursday, and I should have that done by the end of the weekend, i hope.......

Here's what it looks like so far: (Many other people stretched out the knitting with pins as it will be at the end when we block it, but I am not set up to do that, so it is a bit curled up on itself at this stage)(TIP: Click on the pic to see the closeup with the beads)



this is fun!

Christmas gifts part 2

Thanks to some quality knitting time during chorus and a late night gabfest with a friend, I finished Meghan's turtle over the weekend!

in the end, i gave up on the last little bit of the shell pattern, but it isn't noticeable, really. it was an extra "icord" around the bottom of the shell where the dark and light parts meet. and when i tried to do that, the directions defeated me. Besides, that part of the shell isn't really all that visible.

So - without further ado, here is Sheldon!

Harry Potter Knit/Crochet House Cup 2010

i thought i was dropping out of the HPKCHC as of this term.  it has mushroomed in size and the busy threads started to remind me of leaky lounge post-HBP; i couldn't keep up! i felt the group had lost that little home-away-from-home feel i was first attracted to.  however, to be honest, i couldn't keep up project-wise either. RL kind of sucked this autumn with a big re-org at work threatening my livelihood and friends losing jobs all around me.

the sign-up form went up yesterday for the jan/feb/mar term and in the end, i just couldn't resist.  after all, their challenges have been so well thought out and fun to work around!  

so, stay tuned for more HP silliness in 2010.  ~snakey

  

Christmas gifts

When I was a kid, I was never really one for handmade gifts, giving or receiving them. I tried to be polite about it, but the scarves and hats were scratchy or didn't fit well, and the gloves were simply a pain. I HATED all those pieces of thread inside. they caught on everything - my fingers, any jewelry I was wearing (rare though it was), band-aids....

So what am I doing?

Knitting presents for my niece and nephew. Duh!

The difference is - first off, I checked first with my 8yo nephew and let him pick out the stuffie he wanted, and he has seen a bit of the progress on it. (pics of that will come later) As for my 4yo niece? Well, first I was going to make her some stackable cats, cuz she loves cats, Then I was going to make her the chicken-and-egg, because i loved dolls that inversed like that when i was little. She may still get that one for Easter.

But then i remembered this pattern.

And it can be dressed up later....

Dang. i may need to make MYSELF one of these!

Here is how far I am so far:

a win/lose situation

Well, I signed up for quidditch last term. They divided us into 7-player teams and made us come up with background and goals for charity knitting. Our team ("team Chance") chose to knit 3 items each, for a total of 21 items. We could each donate to the charity of our choice. We had 2 1/2 months to knit our 3 items; the term started Sept 1 and ended yesterday, but we had to have our pictures in to our Seeker in mid-Nov.

I originally chose Knit for Kids, an organization that sends knitted sweaters to children in need both internationally and here in america. The pattern was dead-easy and came in sized from toddler to pre-teen.

then i encountered a long string of setbacks. the first project, easy as it was, took 2 weeks to knit the first half of the toddler sized sweater. oops! so i abandoned that project (although i plan to finish the sweater sometime) and cast about for smaller endeavors.

At the beginning of October, i decided to knit newborn caps, as one of my teammates had done that and had already finished 3. So i ordered appropriate weight yarn and needles and got to work....only to discover that i had chosen a really complex pattern that did not knit up easily - and worse yet, you couldn't even tell when i was finished that i had done anything fancy to it at all. (see the preemie cap in the middle) that little preemie cap took me over 2 weeks to make. So I abandoned that pattern in favor of a different one. Unfortunately, the next one i chose also was time/labor intensive, as it called for 3 colors of yarn in a dropstitch pattern. the result (the larger striped one on the right) looks AWESOME and it is stretchy, thanks to some better sock yarn. But between the flu and the length of time it took to knit that, it was now well into November and i still had one more hat to do.

the third pattern i chose turned out to be the simplest of all and the fastest to make. the hat also probably will be the easiest for newborns to wear, it is soft and stretchy without being binding. i love the vertical stitch pattern it made like lazy wide ribs. (see hat on the left.)

i finished it....just before thanksgiving. if i had been able to take its pic and post before i left for my folks, MAYBE i could have helped my team. as it was, today was the first day i could even upload the pics i took at mom and dad's, where this shot was taken. So - EPIC fail for my quidditch team. I am so embarrassed i haven't even been on ravelry to see what happened with them.

also, i don't yet know where i am going to donate these caps. i haven't gotten organized enough to call the local children's hospitals and i didn't find anywhere online that looked like a good, legit prospect.

anyone know of a place that might want 3 cleveland-colored newborn hats?

snagged a half-price book

you know, as much as i love the process of crochet, as often as not, crochet produces what i would consider sad results. i have tried to outrun that reality by turning to amigurumi or hiding the crochet stitches in more complicated combos like the scallop, but then i found a felted crochet book and my little snakey-heart leaped!

felting ERASES crochet sadness by blurring it into chenille. this book had simple projects that looked so soft and velvety, so fuzzy and simple, i ran out and bought some nice new wool and started a sample square last night. :D

so, put felting on the list along with the beading thing.

FACT: i need more knit-lunches per week!

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oh, btw...enjoy this.